Kansas City News Blog

from myspace.com/dennishess

​Dennis Hess died June 15. Three months earlier, he'd been hospitalized. According to his widow, Lena Hess, and her lawyer, Robert Arnold, Hess tried to commit suicide by mixing prescription drugs and alcohol. But his friends and family say the March incident was an accident.

In an interview with Sgt. Chad Phillips of the Platte County Sheriff's Department, Lena Hess described what her lawyer characterized as Dennis Hess' first suicide attempt. Lena said she received a call from Hess, who was staying in a hotel while the couple's divorce was pending. Lena said Hess told her he loved her and was going to kill himself. Lena said she called David and Tiffany Cox, Hess' friends, and asked them to go check on him. Arnold told Phillips that Hess left a suicide note, but that the Coxes ripped it up.

But that story differs from what a source very close to Hess tells The Pitch. Hess had recently been prescribed 10mg of Xanax and a steroid called prednisone. The source says that Hess wasn't accustomed to taking pills, having been healthy up until a cancer diagnosis in 2007. Additionally, Hess was weakened by the cancer treatments that required him to eat through a feeding tube attached to his stomach. The Xanax he was told to take three times daily was too strong a dose for him, the source says.

"He was fine," Hess' friend Deann Leddick told The Pitch in an earlier interview. "He just drank too much, [combined with] the pills and the anxiety ... he wasn't trying to off himself." 

The afternoon before Hess was hospitalized, Hess had gone with the Coxes and  Leddick to Bar 12 for a couple drinks. When the friends dropped Hess back off at the hotel, the source says, he talked with Lena over the phone, then called his daughter Michelle Cerruti in Las Vegas. He told Cerruti that he felt strange, and then it sounded as though the phone dropped from his hands. Cerruti called the front desk of the hotel, and the employee who picked up the phone knocked on Hess' door. Hearing no response, she called 911. Cerruti, meanwhile, asked David and Tiffany Cox to go check on her father.  

Tiffany Cox tells The Pitch that when they got inside Hess' hotel room, they found him curled up in the fetal position, unresponsive. She thought he was dead. "He's not waking up," she says. "My husband's jumping on the bed, I'm freakin' out, she's (Leddick) trying to wake him up. It was a mess."

When the Coxes and Leddick arrived at the hospital, following Hess in an ambulance, Lena was already waiting there. Hess' friends confronted her, Tiffany says. "Everyone's yelling. ... We're like, 'Stop this now, the man can't take anymore. Enough.' And she says, 'This is the end, I'm going to give him all his [assets] back, he can come back home.'"

But the next day, nothing changed, Tiffany says. Hess was still barred via an order of protection from entering his home and his bar. "It just went downhill from there," Leddick says. Hess died on June 15.

On July 31, Jackson County Deputy Medical Examiner Laura Knight ruled Hess' death a suicide, caused by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. His left hand tested positive for gunshot residue. A test for gunshot residue on his wife's hands came back negative, according to the sheriff's department.

Questions about Hess' death still linger in the minds of his family and friends. Daughters Cerruti and Audra Wyatt told investigators that when they each talked to Hess just a few hours before his death, he sounded upbeat and happy. Former employees say that he was dominantly right-handed and couldn't possibly have pulled the trigger with his left. Sources with access to the investigative report point out that the gun was positioned strangely in Hess' lap, sandwiched between the back of his left hand and the palm of his right. A source close to Hess says that he loved Lena's young daughter dearly and would never have committed an act of violence with her in the house.

Former Denim & Diamonds manager Craig Wolfe may have said it best: "There's three people who know what happened in that house that day: Dennis, Lena and God."